Master of the Universe
by New Yorktown
Summary: Stranded in a strange timeline with no Doctor, no Gallifrey and a TARDIS with no functional systems save the chameleon circuit, what is the most infamous of the Time Lords to do when the only material they have to effect repairs with is a bunch of polymorphic sapient rocks?
1. Prologue

"WARNING! WARNING! WE ARE ON HIGH ALERT! HOSTILE ELEMENTS ARE ON THE LOOSE WITHIN THIS FACILITY! WE ARE AT, ON MAXIMUM SECURITY STATUS. EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU, GET UP AND DESTROY THE INTRUDER! THE DIAMONDS MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS!"

"Hmm, space stations like this usually have automated alerts for this sort of thing. Seems I've captured her personal attention."

As if to confirm this thought aloud idle wondering, the frazzled, openly panicking voice of the Holly Blue Agate continued to ring out through the lonesome bright hallways of the Homeworld base. The noise of large numbers of heavy, rushing footsteps echoed through the empty volumes of the understaffed orbital facility as the garrison of defectives were roused into genuine action by the most dire, most genuinely frightening string of commands and threats they'd received in their immortal lives. Their bright skin tones and shiny blue uniforms huddled together in undisciplined but energetic crowds as the Gems staffed at the base rushed into action, the most activity the Zoo had seen in its entire existence.

In sharp contrast to this unprecedented ruckus of panic and activity by the Homeworld Gems, the cause of all this concern was a single man standing patiently in an elevator, relaxed in posture and almost looking bored as he waited for the lift to reach its destination. In sharp contrast to the ever present bright lighting and colorful, towering figures endemic to Diamond Authority facilities, the lone intruder was an average sized light skinned man, similar in physical shape to the specimens kept within the space station's zoo, but fully dressed in an entirely black, buttoned up suit and matching gloves. The most distinct difference between him and the stock, however, lay within the face. This man possessed an immaculately well-groomed goatee and smoothed back hair, a natural deep black tinged with silver. A sharp, calculating intelligence shone through his dark, sunken eyes, another sharp contrast between the generations of bred placidity that marked the usual expressions of the Zoomans.

All these thoughts and more flashed through the mind of the Amethyst guard standing next to the opening elevator, who had spun around and drawn her weapon from inside her left shoulder mounted gemstone, bringing her face to face with an organic of a clearly, strikingly different nature than the ones she and her family of defects had spent thousands of years guarding. Those were also her last thoughts, as a brilliant beam of energy jumped out of the small object the organic had in his right hand and drilled a pinprick small point into the Amethyst's gemstone. Less than a second later, the living stone burst like a prism, matching beams of light breaking out from beneath the surface as the stone vaporized into dust and the hard light body winked permanently out of existence.

Across the room, eyes grew wide in shock. They had seen Gems get poofed before, of course, but there had always been a strangely reassuring clattering noise as the physical stone fell to the ground in the aftermath.

"Stop right there! You will tread no further on the Diamond graced ground of this instillation!" Holly Blue Agate screamed in defiance, brandishing her whip with abandon and seemingly ready for the fight of her life as the organic continued to stride calmly towards her. The Gem commander's eyes briefly glanced to the side. "My clarity, stand clear! I will dispose of this organic personally." Then, as he eyes passed to the still approaching figure, she added "YOU WILL BE PREMATURELY CULLED, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME!?"

"I am afraid a lack of understanding is solely your domain at the moment overseer." The dark individual stated matter of factually, passing through the brightly colored control room like a growing shadow. Without looking over his shoulder, he casually added "Excellent work Sapphire, Pearl, Steven. You have all played your roles to perfection."

Betrayal and confusion rushed across Holly Blue's face as the Crystal Gems on the other side of the room seemed to shift uncomfortably, seeming to find even the man's praise disconcerting and still reeling from his unexpected killing of the soldier at the elevator. The momentary break this produced in the Gem commander's guard was all he needed to slip past her defense, getting very close to and locking eyes with Holly Blue as her devout, loyalist world view crumbled around her, along with her perception of reality.

"I will... you will..." she stuttered, strength gradually fading from both her voice and eyes. The dark, sunken eyes of the organic never wavered in their overpowering stare, not breaking contact for even a second to glance out the window that proudly displayed the station's true prize just over Holly Blue Agate's shoulder. "...You will never overcome the Diamonds, they... they are eternal. Per...perfect..."

"They have certainly constructed you with the grace of a practiced hand. Your mind is rigid, obedient by default. You, like many of your kind and even the Diamonds themselves, are far more of a slave than the ones you rule over. It is this bitter irony that will serve as the foundation of your empire's destruction." The dark figure, feeling the last moment of mental resistance break before him, sealing the hypnosis with one final word before pushing Holly Blue aside to gaze upon the gigantic, hand shaped starship that was visible through the window.

"For I am the Master, and you will obey me."

* * *

_Two Years Earlier_

A groaning, wheezing noise filled the air on a barren, windswept dune highway on the outskirts of Beach City. The sound began as a steady reverb but quickly sputtered in a choking, hacking rattle as the sand, scrub and paved road was joined by a blocky object seeming to appear out of thin air in front of a green highway sign, proudly proclaiming somewhere called Beach City to be only a few miles away, while the name of a more distant city that lay in the opposite direction was crudely but thoroughly painted over. Seeming to flicker in and out of reality before finally settling on "in," the object revealed itself as a solid square, taller and wider than a man magnetic tape computer bank, extremely outdated technology that never the less looked like it had been manufactured yesterday, even after appearing on top of a patch of beach scrub and being buffeted by sand carrying winds.

Then, even more amazingly but to the complete disinterest of the few seagulls that were the event's only living observers, the side panel of the computer cube slid open, like an automatic door, but it retracted vertically into what seemed to be nothing at all. A cloud of white smoke quickly bellowed through this impossible opening, and was soon followed by the tall, dark form of the Master, ruthless Time Lord renegade, stumbling into the salty sea air, coughing a great deal as he stepped out of the smoke.

"...another of Kronos' creative interpretations, I'm sure, meant to be a release to the freedom of oblivion." He muttered to himself somewhat angrily, still running over the damage assessments he had conducted after landing, but despite all this, couldn't help but crack a wry smile after looking around and realizing he was back on Earth. _"And so the game is afoot again. I wonder, has the Doctor made a contemporary landing with me, or has one of us left the other in the relative past?" _The Master thought to himself as he walked to the road, first thought being to procure transportation. _"The significant damage Kronos might have left our craft at a rare operational parity..."_

Caught up in a private chuckle at this sardonic thought and genuinely not expecting the answer to his problems to arrive so quickly, the Master was surprised when the voice of a human male called out "Hey man, do you need a lift or anything?" Without letting this surprise express itself on his face, the Time Lord turned around to face a balding, aged man with a rough beard who had climbed out of a parked, worn out truck advertising some sort of cleaning service. "You uh, hitchhiking or did the ex drive off with the car and leave on the side of the road?" He asked with a dismissive chuckle.

"Something like that." The Master muttered, taking a bold step forward and instantly causing the human's face to shift with a sudden onset of visible worry, getting a bad feeling from the man in black almost right away. "Please excuse me, my name is Thompson Keller, and you are correct in presuming I am in need of transportation." Inwardly, the Master was groaning as he steadily gained more information on where he was. _"My TARDIS is non-functional, the Doctor could be anywhere waiting for me, and I seem to have landed in America. Truly the mercy of Kronos knows no bounds."_

"Greg Universe." The owner of the van said quickly, feet sort of kicking at the roadside sand as he quickly rethought his initial decision to walk over to the man on the side of the road. "So, uh, are you a vacationer or something? You sound English, but, you know, I don't want to make assumptions or anything..." Greg spoke quickly, getting a very uncomfortable feeling from the dark suited man and straining to keep his eyes from darting to the other occupant of the van. "...I toured over there once you know, it was a limited run but it sure is a nice country! Anyways, I'm on my way back into town, I can have a tow truck sent out here..."

"Mr. Universe, let us skip the formalities, I think it is clear we both know what is occurring." The Master spoke, putting his right hand into a suit pocket and leaving it there, allowing the human's imagination to do all the work of intimidating him without even drawing his trusty Tissue Compression Eliminator. "Step away from the vehicle, if you would." He commanded, still sounding as if he were asking a mild request.

"Look, please, let's not do anything rash." Greg responded in a desperate tone of voice, eyes finally breaking to check the inside of the van, where a young boy with dark, messy hair was still fast asleep in the passenger seat, and of course, the Master followed this gaze and saw the boy as well. "Whatever you want, it's yours, I won't fight you for it. Just please, let me and my son go."

The father's impassioned plea flowed over the renegade Time Lord without affecting him in the slightest, as he calculated his course of action with cold pragmatism. _"Their deaths would make an irresistible lure for the Doctor, and considering this is a completely different continent than his usual base, he'd have to bring a large amount of his equipment with him, possibly opening a window to acquire the means to repair my TARDIS. Perhaps..." _He wandered over the train of thought for awhile, casually oblivious to Greg's increasingly worried expression, before eventually squashing it. _"No, I must not be reckless. The Doctor has discovered some means to subvert Gallifrey's control of his TARDIS, and that makes him unpredictable. It wouldn't do to catch his attention before I have a proper greeting prepared."_

"Take your child out of the car and begin walking towards the city. Do not wake him, and do not look back." The Master commanded curtly, putting a look of seemingly bottomless relief on Greg's face before adopting a sharper, deeper tone as he looked the human directly in the eyes. "You will forget all about this encounter. If anyone asks what has happened, you will tell them you crashed your van outside the town and walked back. Do you understand?"

"Yes, yes I do sir. I won't tell anyone, I swear!" Greg said quickly, and with far more energy than someone who was acknowledging the Master's hypnotic control. As the old rockstar walked around to the passenger side door and delicately removed the sleeping Steven Universe from the opposite seat, the Time Lord watched them with cold indifference, once again contemplating killing the two. _"His will is surprisingly resistant to my influence... but this is ultimately of no matter. I have no intention of taking permanent residence in this ridiculous contraption after all, so when it is inevitably found abandoned the human authorities will not believe his story."_

No further words were exchanged between the two, and Greg Universe walked down the road carrying his son as quickly as he could without agitating the carjacker he was leaving behind, though the Master ceased to think about the two humans well before Greg stopped thinking about him. By the time Steven awoke from his slumber, the disguised space and time machine had been successfully loaded into the back of the car wash truck, and the Master was speeding off down the road in the opposite direction, eyes peeled for a place to hide and a place to dump the vehicle. The Time Lord would eventually find both places, and while Greg would soon enough recover and repair his vehicle with a minimum of expenses involved, he knew this incident and the threat it posed to Steven would weigh on him for the rest of his life. He knew that before Steven had even woken up in his arms as the single father walked away from a car jacking that could have easily turned fatal.

Letting out a yawn, Steven saw the face of his dad as soon as he opened his eyes, asking "Morning dad, are we back already?" with an innocent tone as he quickly realized he wasn't in the van anymore. Though he grew more confused the more he processed of his environment, the boy remained confident that his parent had an explanation for him.

His heart still pounding in his chest, Greg put on a brave face and did what he now felt he had to do, a fear of the man in black taking deep root inside of him. "Hey Steven," he said, still trying to sound casual. "Let's talk a little more about you going to live with the Crystal Gems for awhile..."

* * *

"Tell me, are you aware of the fact that your planet has been meddled with, quite clumsily at that, by the hands of an imperialistic, superior alien intelligence?"

The Master was looking sideways with a cracked eyebrow at the blank eyed librarian as he asked his rhetorical question and snapped shut the hardcover history book he'd been reading in one hand, carefully setting it down on a table alongside the other material he'd spent the evening pouring over. It had been roughly a day and a half since his unexpected landing, and after finding an isolated side of the road to abandon Greg's van and assess the damage to his TARDIS, had effected basic repairs to the only still functioning system: the chameleon circuit. The machine that was currently only capable of traveling through space was parked outside of the first library the Master had found in the first city the Master had found, zipping down the countryside at impossible speeds in the form of a vintage, deep black rolls-royce.

His initial plan upon arriving at the library had simply been to assesses their collection of newspapers to determine where and when he had landed, perhaps find an article on some cutting edge research project or upstart social movement he could use to his advantage. However, early incongruities generated questions, and the deeper the Master read into this world's history to answer those questions, the more disturbed he felt himself become. The library had been closed for the night a few hours ago, but he'd simply hypnotized anyone who discovered him into forgetting about him, and once there was only one employee left closing up, the Master more thoroughly hypnotized the roughly middle aged female librarian into retrieving more books to continue his research and serve as someone for him to bounce rhetorical questions off of.

"Severe, continental scale geological instabilities, strange structures dated to periods preceding the development of human civilizations, bizarrely recurrent themes and symbols in harshly divorced human cultures revolving around gemstones, and most curiously, a seemingly species wide aversion to exploring any of these questions in depth." The Master mused aloud, walking around his table of spent research material while the librarian stood to the side and smiled vacantly. He stopped for a moment to look down at a book written on the American Revolution, opened to a page displaying a painting of a rebel robot running into a spot of bother with a shark. "As someone who has first hand experience with the phenomenon, this planet has all the signs of having experienced an alien invasion."

_"All of them, of course, except one." _The Master mused to himself, a dark expression crossing his face as he mused on the possibilities. _"Wherever invaders from the stars arrive to menace __the helpless sheep of the galaxy, the Doctor is never far behind. For all his bleating of antiquated morality he has always been reliably effective in dispatching such invaders and forcing the natives' development to return to some dreadfully boilerplate natural course. So where has he been for this world?"_

"Would you like to check out any of those books?" The librarian asked vacantly, the familiar phrase emerging from the mist the Master's psychic power had placed over her mind.

"No, goodbye."

With the small click of the thumb, the Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator flared to life, washing away the form of the human woman who had been assisting the Time Lord and leaving a shrunken doll in her place. Despite how many times the renegade had unleashed this weapon upon witless human beings, this time the act failed to invigorate his wicked mind as the Time Lord had come to expect. Normally, the burst of brilliant, shrinking light was the opening rush, the first thrill that heralded another battle against the Doctor.

This time, however, the Master's mind was not alight with passion, was not bursting with creativity. By this point, behind his dark visage the Master usually gleefully evaluating his environment, searching for the perfect place to leave his calling card. Somewhere that it would be found, but obscure enough that some other clumsy human wouldn't ruin the surprise ahead of time for the Doctor and of course, somewhere with a bit of charm to it. He was very rarely able to see his rival's reaction to the discovery in person, but the thought of it occurring never failed to put a small smile on the Master's face. This absence of excitement surprised the renegade for only a moment, but he did not struggle to find the source of his emotional distress. Picking the shrunken corpse off the floor, he briefly fiddled with one of her arms, waving it up and down by pinching her limp wrist between his thumb and index finger.

Sighing and scowling, the Master muttered under his breath "What's the point of putting in the effort if there is no one to appreciate it?" He asked aloud with an already weary sigh. _"The humans of this world are seemingly completely unaware of their invasion despite the complete lack of effort to hide the aftermath. The Doctor's care for this insignificant race, as baffling as it is, would never permit him to allow such a state of affairs." _Casting one last look down at the open book and the picture it displayed, the Master then left the library behind, passingly deciding to just drop the shrunken body in a storm drain on his way back to the disguised machine parked on the curb.

_"I suppose I'll have to go the source for answers then, and hopefully the means to repair my TARDIS in the process. They've certainly left enough junk laying around." _The Time Lord mused while stepping into the crisp city night and walking down the steps to the street. Taking a moment to look up at the full moon shining bright in the sky, the Master allowed a private moment of doubt to cross his mind, but only for a moment before crushing it. "_Though presuming such specific things about with such little information about a timeline is normally the mark of a supremely novice temporal scientist, the boundless mercy of Kronos does add the possibility of an intelligent hand selecting a timeline to drop me in, instead of it being a decision of pure, infinite chance. A universe without the Doctor..."_

Now scowling, the Master looked away from the moon, back to his disguised TARDIS and rapidly began to calculate what systems need to be repaired and what he'd need access to to conduct such highly technological work. He already knew it would need to come from these unopposed aliens, whether they still ruled this planet from the shadows or not. _"...Was this an attempt at mercy, or at punishment?" _The Time Lord thought once more of the fickle time monster that he had fled from, one more passing musing before opening the door and entering his TARDIS, at which point he would be focused entirely on technical work. _"...and if it was meant to be a punishment, or a mercy, who was it directed to? The Doctor or myself?"_

**_AUTHOR'S NOTES_**

_Hello, and thank you to everyone who opted to give this a read! So, I'll admit upfront that this is a strange idea for a story and I wrote this first chapter primarily as a thought experiment and to see what everyone sort of thinks of the general idea, but I'm open to writing more but it'd probably come fairly slowly. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Classic Series, this is the first incarnation of The Master, as played by Roger Delgado and following right on the heels of a serial called The Time Monster. I'd been thinking about this as a story idea for awhile, about if Steven and the Crystal Gems had to deal with a sort of out of genre/context sort of threat, and came to the conclusion the Master had some interesting themes behind the character that could potentially jive well with the ideas behind Steven Universe was also being very different in execution. Let me know what you think and thanks again for reading!_


	2. Laser Light Salvage

_The rain slicked gutters of Empire City were choking and gurgling, a viscous discharge from the overflowing, underground pipes, like a lifelong smoker hacking up their liquidized trachea. The black, cloud drenched sky formed a perfect cover for dirt cheap dirty deeds, and the ocean of foul rain stood ready to wash any implicating traces into the depths, down below the surface with all the other forgotten secrets and despicable truths. But while the rain would eventually be replaced with the sterile glare of the shinning sun, the truth of the human condition would always..._

"Douglas, cut it out. I can tell by the look on your face you're still doing that film noir overwrought monologue thing again, just inside your head."

"What, I can't have my own thoughts now? I'm still walking aren't I Dale?"

"Well you could be walking faster, and you should be! I get the impression this Mr. Seta isn't the type who likes to kept waiting."

The two arguing figures, their brotherhood with one another clearly communicated by the commonalities of their physical appearances, were slipping through an Empire City back street as quickly as possible without slipping on the torrential rainfall. The matching heavy jackets and hoods they were wearing protected them from both precipitation and identification, and after not much longer the two had descended down a street side stairwell, punched in a combination on the electronically locked door sitting disused on the lower level apartment door. When the light flashed green in confirmation, both hesitated for a moment.

"This'll be the last job, right Dale? Then we'll have enough saved away to get mom her operation?" The younger of the two brothers asked, looking expectantly at his older sibling, whose face had briefly softened in response to the question.

With a sigh, Dale answered "Hopefully. Provided everything goes right and we get payed what was promised, it should. All the more reason to do this one right, okay Douglas?" When his brother nodded in the affirmative, Dale finally pushed the unlocked door open, stepping into the front and main room of a smokey downstairs apartment.

Waiting on the other side of the rusted but heavy door were two other men, a twitchy redhead sitting on a couch and a dark skinned bald man leaning against a corner wall. The red head was eyeballing the two blond, clean cut brothers as soon as they walked in, his wild overgrown beard magnifying his already naturally sunken eyes. "You're late, both of you."

"As a matter of fact Tremblay, they have arrived at the ideal moment." Spoke a commanding voice as the Master stepped in from the back room of the small apartment. Looking directly at the two newcomers, the renegade asked "You received the advanced payment, I presume?" In any time period that possessed public use cashpoint machines, disposable currency was easy for him to acquire.

Feeling nervous and on the back foot simply by the powerful tone of the man who was undoubtedly their employer now, Dale responded with a nod of the head and a quickly vocalized "Yes, Mr. Seta."

"Then I can brief you on the details of the job as we drive. Mr. Tremblay and Mr. Cartwright are already aware of what their role is, and your mutual part in this job is fairly simple." The Master spoke, and before any could respond his simply snapped his fingers and strode towards the door, the collection of criminals feeling a natural, magnetic compulsion to simply let him pass and follow behind. Soon the team of five was weaving down the dark, slick streets of the city in the work van of some electrical work company the Time Lord had possessed no interest in learning about. Cartwright was driving, clad in an engineer's uniform whose source was, to the human's blissful ignorance, compressed down and stuffed beneath the driver's seat of the very van in question. The rain over Empire City would soon cease to fall, but there was only a cold moonlit night behind the clouds at this point.

The rest of the crew, along with a charming little moped, were crammed in the back. "Are you prepared Mr. Tremblay? Our ability to enjoy the fruits of this heist are contingent upon your success." The Master spoke, while leaning against the back doors of the van as the redhead was seated on the moped, clad in a safety helmet, leather jacket and wearing a backpack.

"I'm ready boss!" Tremblay replied, face red and nose twitching as he prepared for action. After giving a hand gesture, the Master threw open the back doors of the van just in time for the moped to fire to life and fly out the back of the vehicle just as the van ran the red light of a T-shaped intersection, Tremblay taking the right road as the van turned left.

Seemingly unaffected by the still falling buffeting rain, the rogue Time Lord closed the back of the van and turned to addressed the two brothers currently leaning against the driver cabin of the vehicle. "When I give the signal, Tremblay will create the diversion that will allow us to rob the museum without interference and acquire the client's object of interest. Cartwright will subvert the security systems while you two will accompany me inside to acquire the item." The blond criminals simply nodded in acknowledgement.

As the electrical company van sped to one end of the city, Tremblay was rushing passed the blurred city lights burning away in the dark of night, weaving in and out of traffic. His blood felt like it was on fire but the box on his back felt like cold, heavy weight dragging him down, only the machine under his body and the rush inside his brain keeping him going. Within his mind, the words of the man he knew as Mr. Seta echoes endlessly, driving him forward. _"Obey me, Clarence Tremblay, and you will have enough stimulants to last you the rest of your life." _Smiling to himself, he gunned the engine and pushed the machine to his limits, getting a private laugh at how much trouble this fake bomb threat was going to cause the city.

* * *

"Hey Jasper."

Inside the Empire City Museum of Natural History, a night shift security guard had affably moseyed over to a wrinkled, balding old man looking deep into a silver lined hand mirror kept under a glass case. When the senior didn't response, he repeated "Hey, Jasper!" in a louder but not harsher tone of voice. With a start, the elderly man fumbled with his glasses for a moment and turned towards the night watchman.

"Oh, good evening Andrew. Come to shoo me out as the place closes down again I presume?" He spoke in a friendly tone, while thinking to himself _"You've done it again you old coot. I really need to stop lingering here so late when closing hours are approaching..."_

"Well, technically the place closed down ten minutes ago, but if you're not counting neither am I. Come on, I'll show you out." Andrew the security guard answered with a welcoming smile, helping the old man shuffle towards the exit. _"Poor guy, spends all his time here ever since his wife passed away, looking at the exhibits she cared so dearly for. It's a good thing Doctor Kellogg was always such a friendly soul here, otherwise some of the more hot headed guards might have lost their patience with him by now. They take things too seriously, who'd want to steal this junk anyways?"_

After leading Old Jasper Kellogg to the front door of the museum, making sure he had a ride and locking it behind him after he'd shown him out, Andrew snapped his torch to life and began his nightly patrol through the now dark building. The light beam was concentrated dead ahead as Andrew tread through his familiar route as the sideways radiance cast a dim glow over battered, otherworldly suits of armor kept inside glass and a roped off the recreated interior of an ancient human cave dwelling, most of the article based on speculation but with cave paintings of humans amidst towering figures and pyramids of light recreated to the smallest detail based on photographs of a cave in continental Europe.

Passing by the old mirror that Jasper Kellogg seemed enraptured with night after night, the security guard came to a stop out of idle curiosity and shined his torch light down on it. Taking in all the details. "Just an old, cracked mirror." He muttered to himself, not able to make sense of the old man's curiosity about it. _"It's not even in great shape, even by the standards of the old junk in this place." _Andrew thought further. _"The silver is tarnished, the glass is cracked and whatever decorative stone it held near the top was pried out before the museum even put it on display."_

Letting out a grunt and a shrug of resignation to lack of understanding, Andrew turned about to continue his patrol, only for the beam of light he was holding to pass over a dark figure leaning over a different glass box on a pedestal exhibit. The night guard blinked as his mind processed what was happening, finally snapping into action when a small pinprick of red light burst to life in the intruder's hands, seemingly without a sound. "HEY YOU!" He yelled, put on the spot and having no prior experience in how to actually deal with intruders, the job's orientation classes seeming so far way and hard to access in his memory.

The Master slowly turned about as the night guard fumbled to pull an electronic button from his utility belt, content to let the young man bring it up and press it even though he could have easily disemboweled the human with his laser cutter if the Time Lord had wished to stop him. "St...Stay where you are! The silent alarm is already active, the cops will be here..."

Any further demands were cut off when the black clad Douglas clubbed the security guard in the back of the head, sending him to the floor as the Master watched dispassionately. Holding up a gloved hand to receive the outdated flip phone Dale was handing him, the Master selected one of the two contacts that were listed in the phone's registry. "Mr. Cartwright, it seems I must congratulate you! The lack of reaction to our discovery by a night watchman has proven your skills were not exaggerated. You'll make a professional electric engineer yet."

In the underground parking lot leading to the museum, the electrical company van was parked in a discreet corner and a STAFF ONLY door had been broken open, giving Cartwright clear access to the inner electrical workings of the museum, and his natural skills, learned education and a few deceptively alien tools had allowed him to deactivate all the security systems. _"Forgive me for this dad, but after this job I'll be able to wipe out my student debts and go straight." _The young engineer thought to himself, closing his eyes and thinking vaguely of penance before opening them again and speaking back into the disposable phone he'd been given. "Thank you Mr. Seta. Is everything proceeding as planned?"

"Like clockwork." The Master answered, standing over the unconscious security guard while speaking into the phone, having decided to let Dale and Douglass disassemble the glass casing around his true prize. Sliding the flip phone from his left ear to the right, the renegade cast a sunken gaze at the mirror exhibit a short distance away, eyeing it mindfully before asking "Do you have the special instrument I left with you?"

"Got it right here in my hand." Cartwright asked, before pulling a very small, featureless black cube from inside the pocket of his electrical work jumpsuit. The small hairs on the back of his hand tingled and stood on end with an electrical charge when he held it, but beyond that the mysterious tool was a complete mystery to the human. "You finally gonna explain what this one does?"

"No." The Master answered curtly, swiftly hanging up the call, switching over to the other contact, and pressing the button. Without waiting for a pickup that wasn't going to come, he folded the phone into his suit pocket and replaced it with the laser cutter before going to work on the glass box holding the mirror.

As Dale pulled the glass guard away from the other exhibit, Douglass looked at his employer with confusion, a small circle of light provided by the electrical lamp the brothers had set down before going to work. "Uh, boss, isn't this what we came here to steal?" He asked in a mystified tone, before stepping aside to gesture sideways at Dale stepping forward with the prize: A humbly decorated but perfectly crafted ancient dagger, though instead of ending in a sharp point the end of the blade was more of a blunt chisel. The information plate next to the now disassembled glass case described it as a remarkably durable well crafted sacrificial dagger, seemingly the product of construction techniques ages in advance of its carbon dating and incredibly resistant to the ravages of time. Modern historians speculate that this was likely some form of exorbitantly well constructed gift or object of tribute for a politically powerful ruler or religious leader (further signs of custom construction being the oddly small size of the grip, likely a custom grip for a pair of unusually small hands) possibly crafted with the intention of being buried with them.

Without looking back at the object from his precision cutting, the Master responded "Consider this a bonus, you'll be payed extra for it. Won't take a moment, and Tremblay's distraction should be going into affect at this very moment."

* * *

A short while ago and across town, the crook on the moped had come to a stop, parked the vehicle on a side road and was heading towards a public blue mail box to drop off the package. Though the reckless driving and the itchy buzz behind his eyes had filled Tremblay with exhilaration, every step after climbing off the vehicle seemed to carry an exponential weight to it. He was beginning to sweat now, but after the foggy downpour that had just left the city this attracted no attention from the few people still walking the dark streets.

_"Come on, just a few more steps." _Tremblay thought to himself, guilty tremors traveling down his body that he tried to rationalize away as just the usual shakes. _"'It's just a little bomb scare, just pinball machine parts in brown paper box. No one will get hurt, and think of all the china cat you'll be able to buy with this payday!"_

He was at the box now, and all he had to do was pull down the handle and slide the box in, then call the police on the burner phone Mr. Seta had given him. Tremblay was breathing deeply and heavily now, trying to muster his courage against a mental block he couldn't even identify. Practically out of habit, his twitchy eyes scanned back and forth over the surrounding streets in a paranoid panic, the dark words of the Master echoing in his head, but distorted by the haze he had built up over decades of substance abuse.

Then, Tremblay's blood went cold.

Down the road a young, bright eyes couple was leaving a movie theater together, playfully pushing their only umbrella back and forth and both insisting they be the one to soak in long passed rain as the ending point to a fun filled date night. Feeling like he wanted to cry, Tremblay dropped the box to the curb and slumped down against the mail box, overcome with remorse.

"Oh Julie... what have I done!? Why did I sell you to buy more china cat!?" He sobbed, mind as mess as the man finally realized how thoroughly his addiction had ruined his life and the lives of those around him. After a long, remorseful sobbing session in the rain, Tremblay would have been on course to realize how wrong his actions work, actively go clean, repent, and apologize to all those he had wronged with his life of crime. Unfortunately for him, the bomb that the Master had given him was very real, and rigged to a relatively short timer. The blast it generated was by no means massive, but it was enough to vaporize the career criminal on the spot.

Back the basement parking lot of the museum, Dale and Douglas sprinted back to the electrical company van as soon as the door to the stairwell flung open, while the Master followed at a more leisurely pace, looted artifacts contained safely in a padded black suitcase. The two brothers jumped into the back of the van practically giddy with excitement at a job well done, but their congratulatory joy faded when they abruptly realized the vehicle wasn't starting up. "Hey Cartwright, lets get going!" Dale said while banging his fist on the back of the driver's cabin, only to do a double take when he saw through the glass panel that the front seat was empty. "Where's Cartwright?"

"Dead, I'm afraid. I arranged for an electrical accident to befall him once his work was done, where do you think the bonus I offered you was going to come from?" Came the sinister and self-satisfied voice of Mr. Seta, who was standing just outside the back of van, suitcase on the ground and a firearm in hand. "Well, the real answer to that is nowhere, considering I'd planned to dispose of all of you from the beginning, but really, use your mind for once, you sniveling humans."

"Wh... what!? You're just going to off us? Just like that!?" Douglas asked with indignant disbelief, while Dale was simply simmering in silent anger. "What about honor among thieves then?"

"It remains an untrue parlance said sincerely by the very foolish and faithlessly by the very clever. However it would be inaccurate to say that I myself am going to... _off _the both of you." The Master explained in a dry, mocking tone of voice while reaching into his suit pocket with his left hand and producing a cobbled together remote. "Rather you'll both be killed by a head on collision with speeding emergency response vehicles rushing to the bomb explosion, aided physically by the still wet roads and, perhaps in an inspiration sense by the Doctor, for giving me the idea for this. Farewell."

With a click of the button the doors swung shut under their own power, and while both brothers rushed forward to burst out as quickly as possible all their strength was useless against the electromagnets the Master had modified the vehicle, and speaking of his modifications, Dale and Douglas both briefly stopped their efforts to turn around and look towards the driver's cabinet in startled fear when the vehicle's engine fired to life, seemingly on its own.

The primitive remote drive system sent the company van on a clumsy, wide turning rush for the street exit, smashing through the lowered guard as the Master looked on with a mildly amused expression. _"Perhaps if you had let me escape Devil's End in that ridiculous yellow car of yours, fewer of your precious humans would have perished today." _He thought to himself in a mocking tone, but quickly began to scowl when no sound but the dripping of water was left in the parking lot to answer. Wearily, he realized _"Brilliant scheming is far less satisfying without a respectable mind to appreciate it. Outwitting humans... what sort of victory is that?"_

Without another word or sparing another thought for the two brothers who were now hugging each other in panic as they sped to their mutual death, the Master pocketed his gun and picked up his briefcase before stepping into his TARDIS, still reliably disguised as a concrete pillar helping to hold up the ceiling of the parking structure. The Time Lord had managed to restore a small amount of dimensional transcendence and scanning ability to his damaged machine by digging into the time ship's spare parts reserve and cannibalizing more thoroughly damaged systems, but any further repairs and the restoration of time and space flight capability would require an influx of fresh equipment eons ahead of the technological capability of planet earth.

Feeling more at ease as the TARDIS door sealed shut behind him, the Master strode through his black shaded control room and made a quick check on one of the few functioning consoles. After seeing wireless confirmation that the Sontaran execution cube he'd given Cartwright had intend responded to the flip phone circuitry the renegade had wired to its activation systems, and delivered a lethal electrical shock to the human's unprotected face when the second number had been dialed, the Master shut the console off and retired to a salvaged room full of scientific equipment, intending to examine his prize posthaste.

_"No telltale signs of metal working, laser cutting, welding or psionic assemblage." _The Time Lord thought to himself after a few hours of putting his cosmic science degree to use examining the ancient dagger. _"Which leaves... direct molecular assembly the most likely option, though it seems to bear a sort of atomic identifying mark... possibly one end of an isomorphic security system or just a mark of craftsmanship, would need a larger sample size to tell for certain. Not a common sort of thing for replicator employing cultures but not an impossibility..."_

Removing the discarded weapon from the molecular scanner he'd been using to examine it, the Master examined the weapon closely in his hand, turning it about to view it from different angles and stroking his beard in contemplation. "The chemical composition does indicate the raw materials to assemble it come from earth, or at least an Earth like planet, and it is not in and of itself older than human civilization, merely older than the human technology needed to make such a thing." He muttered aloud, lost in thought before appreciatively cracking an eyebrow. "It is still a very well made weapon, even if the chisel blade is a bit of an odd choice. Could be useful against Kastrians perhaps..."

Further ruminations were interrupted by an alarm coming to life from the central control room. Setting the dagger down next to the empty mirror, the Master returned to the console room to see what was causing the alert. _"Seems to be the gravity scanners indicating... a large, dense object is approaching the planet. An interesting development." _The Time Lord thought to himself, also cursing the fact that he lack the more sophisticated working equipment that would be needed to scan it further in depth. Fingers working quickly over the controls of the central computer, a few quick astromath calculations deduced that barring a sudden change of flight paths, the object would impact the planet at a nearby stretch of coast, and while its speed did suggest it was some manner of spacecraft, there was no way for him to be certain.

After checking the time ship's diagnostic display, the Master moved over to input commands to the chameleon circuit. _"Even in this dreadful state a TARDIS of this technological advancement is still more than sufficient to protect me from a localized meteor impact, should this be a worst case scenario." _He decided. _"And, in the best case scenario, Beach City may soon have the materials I need to begin repairs."_

As the sun finally began to rise over a shocked and horrified Empire City, a dark colored, tinted windows modern sports car, sleek but radiating power, burst out of the underground museum garage, initially weaving carefully and lawfully through the panicked streets but flying full speed after reaching the open highway. As loathe as the Master usually was to operate his own vehicles the automatic operation systems of his TARDIS were nonessential enough to be pillaged freely during his initial round of repairs. As the city marked by an unsolvable tragedy vanished behind him, the Master let his mind wander with curiosity, wondering who would be paying this version of planet earth an intergalactic visit?

* * *

As a rain flaming wreckage crashed down against Beach City, the jet black vehicle driven by the renegade Time Lord pulled up to park right next to the significantly more commonplace vehicle owned by one Mr. Fryman, right before a piece of falling debris flattened it. "Blast, I'm too late." The Master muttered to himself after stepping out of his disguised TARDIS and staring into the now clear skies. The spherical object he'd observed on the way in had already been blown to bits in flash of pink light.

"You're telling me!" Came the deep voice of the burly french fry vendor, rushing to the street to observe his crushed vehicle. After the immediate flash of despair hit, his eyes focused intently on the Master and his dark, immaculate suit. "Hey, are you a lawyer or something? Cause, cause I think I might need one."

Turning to face this human with a subdued expression and a dry tone of voice, the Time Lord asked "I am many things. Is their someone in particular you hold responsible for this falling wreckage destroying your vehicle?"

"Well, I mean I can't be certain, but it's gotta be those weird hippie ladies living down at the beach! They're always causing weird stuff to happen, but, uh, perhaps, I've... said... too... much..." The vendor's voice had started with a tone of indignation but steadily trailed off as the Master focused his deep, piercing gaze upon Mr. Fryman, who felt a feeling of dread build inside him even as his feet were rooted to the ground. One eyebrow cracking with curiosity, the Master made a simple demand that the human was powerless to resist.

"Take me to them."

A few minutes later, the Time Lord's eyes widened with mild surprise at the familiar sight of the "It's A Wash!" truck rolling about in the ocean waves as Greg and Steven Universe struggled to pull it back to shore. Though the Master was normally very quick to discard the identities of human victims in particular from their memory, the recent occurrence of the carjacking had kept these two fresh in his mind for the time being. He and the enthralled Mr. Fryman were watching the family from atop a cliff a short distance away, though after a cursory recognition of the two humans, the Time Lord turned his attention to the three further up the beach.

"That's them, right over there, uh... sir. I mean, it's true that they have... sort of a reputation around town, but they also seem to be Steven's main guardians, and, well, he's a good kid and I don't really want to mess up his life by pressing charges against his guardians or anything..." The blond human rambled on as the Master tuned him out entirely, vision focused on the three aliens that were covertly conversing with each other as father and son jumbled through the surf.

"You'd have little success in levying a law suit against extraterrestrials Mr. Fryman, this era is so far lacking in legal precedent for that." The goatee wearing renegade remarked dryly while bringing a small pair of binoculars up to his eyes in an attempt to read the lips of the three womanly aliens, muttering in observation that "They seem to be genuinely speaking English..."

Rubbing the back of his head, Mr. Fryman let out a breath and said apologetically "I mean, I'm pretty sure they're undocumented yes, but I don't think they're illegal immigrants or something like that, they've apparently lived here for some time I've been told. I think they're just weird, off the grid hippies or something." In response to this, the Master lowered the binoculars from his eyes and cast a contemptuous glance of disbelief sideways at the human.

"Mr. Fryman, are you totally incapable of recognizing an alien being standing directly in front of you, after a brazen display of bizarre, otherworldly power?" He asked dryly, locking his sunken eyes against the fry merchant's partially glazed over ones. _"I suppose that answers my own question." _The Time Lord thought to himself as the human blinked at him blankly, but a sudden spot of movement caught his eyes: Of the three aliens, the thin, medium sized one had broken off from the group and was heading towards town while the short one headed for the stone temple constructed on the beach and the tallest moved to assist getting the van out of the sea. "It seems you're out of time then." The Master said curtly, suppressing a shiver of disgust as he locked eyes with the human again, holding back none of his psychic power as he commanded "You will forget having ever seen or spoken with me, and will walk directly into the ocean without stopping."

Then, without having a care in the world for whether the elder Fryman would successfully drown himself or be rescued by the three altruistic figures already down in the surf, the Master walked off to follow Pearl into Beach City.

* * *

"Just stay calm Pearl, it's nothing but an automated survey drone. These things prowl the space lanes for millennia at a time and get destroyed by random space accidents _all the time. _There's no threat of you-know-who coming from you-know-where to do you-don't-want-to-know."

The slender, beak nosed Crystal Gem was muttering these words to herself as she swept through the briefly empty streets of Beach City surveying the wreckage left by the exploded Red Eye, a faint blue light arcing out of her forehead mounted gemstone and scanning over each piece, seemingly in anxious search of something even as she muttered "It's just a probe." over and over again. The words did gradually become less anxious as she searched longer and longer without finding any hint of a pilot to the crash, safe or shattered, and by the time she came across a human pawing through the wreckage, Pearl had relaxed herself enough to mainly react with annoyance.

"Uh, excuse me, that's very dangerous to handle you know. Can I ask you to step way from the flaming wreckage?" Pearl asked, walking up to a man in a suit, back turned to her, seemingly digging around in an ice cream cart flattered by a debris chunk the size of a basketball. Seemingly unsurprised by the intrusion, the man stood up and smoothly turned around to face the Gem, holding a smaller, broken off fragment of the material about the size of an apple.

"Am I to presume you are claiming ownership of this salvage, Miss...?" The Master asked in a disarming, mildly amused tone of voice at the rapidly turning grumpy alien in front of him.

"Pearl will do, you can call me Pearl." The Crystal Gem answered, eyes narrowing as she wondered what to do. _"Humans aren't normally this interested in collecting Gem stuff, odd." _

Before she could say anything further, the Master abruptly cut in, saying "Very well... Pearl. It is wise for you to pointedly not claim ownership of this wreckage from the sky, that might leave you liable for quite a lot of property damage you know. Not from me at least, I'm simply a tourist on holiday, but, well..." He trailed off, before sweeping his arms around to gesture towards the damaged Beach City. "...I imagine the locals aren't particularly happy with this."

"Look, it really would be for the best if you just leave all this be so we can clean it all up." Pearl spoke in an attempt at diplomacy, finding this all to be very strange behavior coming from a human. "You could get... sick. You know, human... sick? With all your bodily fluids getting contaminated and all that unpleasantness."

"Perhaps I do not wish to give it to you, seeing as you have no evidence to prove you are the legitimate owner of this pile of scrap. Perhaps I wish to keep for myself, a memento of my holiday to your wretched little town. Perhaps I'll send it to an accredited scientific institution for analysis. Maybe I simply don't want you to have it." The Master responded, taking a firm but sardonic tone when speaking while holding the metal fragment close to his chest. Arching an eyebrow at Pearl, he asked "What, precisely, are you willing to do to acquire this object for yourself?"

_"Oh, stars give me strength, P...Rose was always so much better at talking humans into things." _Pearl thought with a pang of still fresh grief echoing across her soul. Letting out a sigh and rolling her eyes, the Crystal Gem nonchalantly shoved her own right hand into her forehead, digging around like a person grasping blind into a particularly deep bag. "Alright, how much currency can I give you to hand it over?" She asked dryly, but in response the man simply raised both hands dismissively, then took a step forward to hand her the piece of rubble. "No need for such a crude exchange, I presume we are both higher beings than that... alien."

Pearl's first reaction to this was a dismissive _"We've been here for thousands of years and they only now figure it out?" _but her contempt filled amusement evaporated as soon as she withdrew her empty hand from inside her gemstone to receive the Red Eye wreckage from the mysterious figure, who following his dismissive remark underwent a radical frightening shift of demeanor. His vaguely bemused, obnoxiously smug tourist facade melted into a face of pure, cold malice, and in a lightening quick movement dropped the alien material to the floor and clamped his right hand around Pearl's wrist before locking eyes with her. While the veteran Crystal Gem was screaming at her hard light body to strike back and break free, a cold, familiar feeling was settling over her form as the Master's eyes drilled deeply into her own, a painful static feeling like it was building up in her gemstone itself.

"Do not resist. I am the Master, and you will obey me." His smooth, honeyed voice said as Pearl's body seemed to lock up and the unbroken eye contact seemed to build a splitting ache behind her eyes. "Your will is strong, but your mind is weak, no, not weak... receptive..." The Master muttered, feeling his presence crawl into Pearl's mind with against spirited but easily broken resistance. "You are... not meant to resist, are you? A naturally servile mind..." He asked, as Pearl felt cold squirms trapped inside her body, yearning to get out and break free against this looming domination, but her hologram body refused to obey her, exactly as it had been designed to do. "Tell me... who is your controller? Your previous master?"

A blue static burst over Pearl's eyes as jumbled light burst from her gemstone. The images flicked by rapidly, a confusing mix of voices and events molding together but with one consistency, a tall pink haired woman in a flowing white dress. The Master watched with fascination as her ever shifting form slid by, and with a startle realized that the first image of this mysterious women had depicted her as severely pregnant. Most of the images bursting out of Pearl's forehead were solely of the strange figure, but occasionally images of a group would pass, of her standing beside the other three Crystal Gems and Greg, then just her and the Crystal Gems, and then just her alongside Garnet and Pearl. "A backwards replay of memories, perhaps?" The Master mused absent minded, enraptured by the images but well aware they were getting faster and less coherent. Snippets of a serene voice were gradually lost amidst the familiar cacophony of battle, until one final clear statement emerged.

"...I can't exactly shatter myself."

Then the world exploded.

Letting out a snarling howl as his eyes burned and he fell onto his back, the Master blinked rapidly to try and clear the dreadful static out of his eyes. "Psychic feedback..." He muttered groggily, unsure if he'd said that or simply thought it in the aftermath of being violently ejected from Pearl's mind. By the time he could see clearly again, the Crystal Gem was standing over the fallen Time Lord, holding a spear just an inch from his neck and looking positively murderous. "Talk!" She demanded, clearly fighting against an instinctual desire to eliminate this obvious threat in order to obtain more information. "Now!"

Gently and somewhat sarcastically holding his gloved hands above his head with an inscrutable look on his face, the Master was quiet for a long moment. Then, he cleared his throat, so as to crisply, clearly, and in a pitch perfect imitation of the recurring motherly voice he'd heard in Pearl's projection, say "Stand down, and erase your last five minutes of memory."

Pearl's face went blank with absolute horror as she dropped the spear to the ground, the Time Lord barely rolling out of the way of the sharp end, as her body began to quiver and convulse, a series of pleas and curses gurgling out of her throat as she clearly struggled against her own mind and body, but with moments her body had become completely still as her eyes vanished into blue static. In a flat, emotionless tone the usually extremely motherly Gem dutifully reported "I obey, my Diamond. Memory purged."

Rising to his feet, the Master observed the stock still Crystal Gem with genuine interested, gently stroking his beard with a gloved hand. "Now, this is a most intriguing turn of events."


	3. Moon Goddess Statue

"And there we are Mister Snikda, your new cabinet machine is now fully operational."

"Well, that sure is something new to smile about, since my name is Mister Smiley after all!"

After an awkward pause, during which the Master was unsure if the human was trying to make a joke or simply believed his new business partner had gotten his name wrong and was trying to politely correct him, the man in the dark suit answered with a dry remark of "...No it isn't. That happens to be an alias Harold Snikda, and a very obvious one at that. Please do not insult my intelligence by insisting otherwise."

"Uh... of course Paichnidi, whatever you prefer." Mister Smiley said, still grinning but obviously tripped up and straining to maintain his cheerful forward disposition, using the first name of the strange businessman who'd appeared to him with a strange offer earlier this day: Introducing himself as a market analyst for the SEGA Corporation, Paichnidi Kyrios had offered to install a brand new arcade game and provide Beach City Funland a generous cash payment in exchange for regular data about what kind of business the establishment was doing. Something about testing the viability of a new overseas arcade/restaurant initiative. "Do you really think this will make a prime attraction though? It's sort of an old system, isn't it?"

"It may be old, Harold, but _Space Invaders _is a classic, destined to be remembered through the ages while most of its contemporaries are forgotten and buried as the rubbish that they were, creating the illusion that the previous cultural epoch was a glittering age of endless quality before decaying into the unpleasant present, as is the cyclical nature of cultural development." The Master said briskly and with authority, before stroking his beard with a gloved hand while genuinely contemplating the arcade game. "This work, for example, persistently endures due to the deep thematic message it conveys despite the primitive nature of the medium at the time of its creation, namely the endless, hopeless nature of attempting to resist invasion and conquest by a technologically superior form of life. No matter how hard the human resistance struggles and how high their score might climb, defeat and submission is an inevitability."

_'What serendipitous happenstance that a previous incarnation stole this on a whim and then abandoned it in the storage depths of my TARDIS, it makes the perfect casing for electronic surveillance equipment." _He thought to himself, quite pleased that he now had the means to keep an eye on Beach City while traveling elsewhere, having dug up the old thing during his earlier, thorough ransacking of the relative dimensions in space while searching for repair components. _"My only other idea for its use was to reprogram it to be about the Silurian hibernation bunkers inevitably being overrun and butchered by humans, and then sneaking it into the UNIT HQ breakroom for the Doctor to discover, but as amusing as that might have been this is infinitely more practical."_

Throughout his musings both spoken and private, Mister Smiley had been staring at the Master with a look of bewildered confusion, his smile threatening to break into genuine offense until the Time Lord's sunken eyes gazed sideways at the arcade owner. "You will, of course, contact me personally if anything... strange, develops, of course? Do not hesitate or feel you are diving into unrelated topics if you wish to inform me of something..." He said, a commanding air entering the Master's tone as he felt Harold's will subsume beneath his own. When the hypnosis was complete, the Master broke the short trance he'd placed the human into by stating in a more chipper tone "Human behavior is economic behavior, after all, and insignificant seeming events can have enormous payoffs later in time."

"Of course Mister Snikda, I understood." The arcade owner answered, in a bit of a daze.

"Good man. I'll be off then, best of luck to you..." The Master responded dismissively, quickly shuffling out the door before pulling a plain, paper checklist from his pocket and marking off one of the last couple of errands on his list. _"His mind will prove easy enough to control, and he is already predisposed to dislike the aliens from the beach. He will make a suitable pawn..."_

Striding through the streets of Beach City with an observant scowl, and the gradually dawning realization that he ultimately stuck out like a sore thumb in his black suit amid the pastoral vacation town, and while he did still have a supply of Auton-derived plastic face masks aboard the TARDIS, very little of his wardrobe would prove suitable for such a location. _"But, a matter for another time. For the moment, it is time to check the mail."_

"Good morning postman." The Master smoothly remarked a short while later, waiting in the back of one of the few mail trucks to run through Beach City. The young, thin mailman named Jamie had just climbed into the driver's seat after walking up to a normal home. Unlike the first time The Master had slipped into the back of the government vehicle to make contact with the postal worker, Jamie did not jump in surprise and yell in fear. Instead, he began to placidly resume his usual route, eyes focusing directly on the road even as the man in the black suit rummaged through the accumulated letters and packages behind him in the truck, blatantly committing a federal crime. _"Post-hypnotic suggestion is a wonderful thing." _The time lord mused to himself.

"Good morning postmaster." Jamie said reflexively, mind going blank as the time lord's psychic will projected an altered version of reality over his perception that made all of this seem perfectly normal. "The usual inspection then?"

"Yes, still the usual. Unpleasant work I know, but it's all for queen and country and all that then..." The Master spoke dismissively, pocketing a few useful looking envelopes that were likely full of useful local currency while searching for anything to be delivered to the Universe residence. "Absurd, what sort of task force like this has a public mailing address? If UNIT were this clumsy I'd have sent The Doctor a bomb in the postage instead of having to use Miss Grant...

"Problem, postmaster?" Jamie asked distractedly as the truck pulled up to its next stop and The Master realized he'd been mumbling to himself.

"Nothing to worry about, just keep up your... deliveries..." He dismissed over his shoulder, but rapidly looked back after unearthing a brown wrapped package. Turning it over in his hands a few times, the time lord asked "You can confirm this is going to the house on the beach, correct?"

"Yes postmaster. Hopefully it's Steven's cheeseburger backpack, he's been eager to have it come in, says it's gonna help his...his... moms?" Jamie volunteered readily, but stumbled further into the fog of hypnosis when his surface brain couldn't retrieve the exact specifics of how exactly the young man was related to the three beings he lived with.

"Never mind that, why is he so excited to have this delivered?" The Master asked dismissively.

"He really wants to go camping or something sometimes, says having a way to carry things will make him a contributing member of the team. He's been waiting out on his mailbox for it arrive every day since he ordered it." Jamie responded, a small chuckle of amusement at the young boy's cheerful antics leaking through the placidity of hypnosis. "Excuse me postmaster, need to make another delivery." He said as the truck came to a stop, and the mailman left his vehicle to deliver the next box's worth of mail with a robotic lockstep.

The Master had long since stopped paying attention to Jamie however, instead boring his sunken gaze into the brown wrapped package in his hands. When Jamie returned to the truck there was no sign of the man in black, even in the memory of the aspiring actor, the simple hypnotic command easily erasing itself until once again needed. The first few times The Master had spied on the mail headed for the home of the gems, the short term inability to remember sections of work had caused Jamie concern, but he soon enough dismissed it as the mounting drudgery of the job steadily getting to him, pushing him closer and closer to simply giving up on it to chase his genuine dream.

"I guess that's why I like Steven so much." Jamie muttered to himself as the haze faded from his mind, smiling slightly. "He's a fresh ray of sunshine on a cloudy, boring daily route. I hope this backpack helps him out at some point."

* * *

"Suck it in, Steven!"

As the light of the warp pad activating fades away, silence once again settles over the beach house built onto the gem temple. The silence lasts only a moment, however, before a faint, low wheezing like a tea kettle just barely boiling over split the air before fading automatically. The small paper receipt that had fallen out of the box the novelty backpack had come in was gone, and in its place stood a tall, metallic refrigerator, that opened with the sound of an airlock unsealing.

The Master strode out of his TARDIS and into the Universe residence, standing alone amid the odd blend of homely earth architecture and strange alien science. His eyes were instantly drawn to the warp pad, and he rushed over to examine it personally while his TARDIS directed whatever scanners were still functional to its immediate surroundings.

"Some sort of primitive closed end matter transmitter structure... no, not necessarily primitive... damaged perhaps?" The Master muttered allowed while examining the teleportation platform with a hand size scanning tool. "Similar molecular structure to the dagger... and much the same age it seems. Intriguing."

Satisfied with letting his TARDIS conduct the remaining scans on the warp pad, The Master looked around the beach house for the first true time, taking in the quaint, warm atmosphere with his cold expression. Having confirmed he now had the run of the place before he had even disengaged the chameleon circuit's box disguise, the time lord took a moment to really process the domicile he had smuggled himself into.

_"This isn't a base, it's not even an intelligence outpost." _The Master realized as he pawned through drawers and checked under couches, certain that there had to be some sort of hidden panel or secret purpose he hadn't yet discovered. _"What sort of higher extra-terrestrial being with such obvious superiority to humanity ever choose to live like this!?"_

The idea briefly crossed The Master's mind that this might be some sort of elaborate trap by The Doctor, but then dismissed it with a huff as he sat down on the couch. "The Doctor lacks the patience for such prolonged maneuvers, if this was a trap he's have sprung it by now." He muttered, and after a moment of hearing nothing but the gentle waves breaking against the sand outside the home's wooden walls, the time lord stood up in an agitated jitter. "This is no command center, no listening post, no barracks! It's a house! An ordinary house, for a child to live in!" The conquering alien practically spat with disbelief. "Even The Doctor is not so idle or attached to this primitive species to just... tend to spawnlings and watch the waves! For his many other endless flaws he is still a being of action, in pursuit of stimulation! What manner of creatures are these things?"

Then, out of the corner of his eye, The Master spotted the painting hanging on the wall. A serene image of a woman of bountiful pink hair and a white dress, hung up in memoriam. "And who might you be?" He quietly asked himself. Instinctively, he tore the painting of Rose Quartz off the wall to check for a potential safe or computer terminal hidden behind it, and put it back, perfectly in place, once disappointment had been unveiled to him. Searching his memory once nothing of value had been found behind the painting, clarity soon crossed the time lord's sharp features. "Ah, from the servant's holographic records, of course. Well, I'm not going to uncover anything simply by gawking at... and what might you be?"

Sitting forgotten, rolled beneath the edge of the couch during Steven's packing spree and left behind, was the sharp bottomed Moon Goddess Statue, gently peaking out from under the furniture. Eyebrow cracking at the only piece of glittering alien technology that was within easy reach, The Master held in one gloved hand with quiet but quick contemplation, swiftly deciding to stow it in his TARDIS for analysis. Emerging a short time later with a silver metal suitcase in hand, the time lord made a quick job of bugging the Universe residence after deciding against hiding a bomb in the beach house, unsure of how much time he had before the residents transmatted back in.

* * *

An hour later, The Master had discreetly returned his time and space machine to the Funland Arcade, casually disguised as an out of order vending machine in an isolated corner where a minimum of neon light cast itself. After drawing all remaining power to his control room to reactivate a section of the control panel and activate a wall panel, the time lord renegade delicately placed the gemstone point of the pilfered statue into a console slot the shape-shifting machine had obediently provided. The central console began to hum, time rotor glowing but not moving, as the screen ignited with a series of green shaded data readouts.

"Hmm, data loss among archive records appears to be minimal, though the TARDIS will require more artron energy to access deeper files and provide temporal cross-references..." He muttered to himself, assessing the damage out loud. _"Even with all the time that has passed since I erased my records from the Gallifreyan information matrix I have not yet managed to unlock all the secrets of the records I copied and took with me. The deepest, darkest secrets of our glorious civilization are laying right at my fingers every time I chart a fresh course into mayhem... but they serve my purposes well enough in their restricted state, and even in this damaged state, the system should be able to perform a basic historical check on this object, tell me who in particular it depicts, if anyone."_

Having chased that thought to its conclusion and then seeing that the search command he'd input was still running, The Master scowled and turned his back to the screen, clenching a black gloved fist. "Let the High Council, the Lord President and the Celestial Intervention Agency play their temporal games with the vampires and the elder gods! There is only one mind in the cosmos sharp enough to cross my sword against, only a singular intelligence brilliant enough to serve as a muse to my diabolical schemes! A being of my genius deserves nothing less for an opponent!"

A gentle chime interrupted the rambling of the time lord, as the matrix search produced... surprisingly little. Scowl deepening, The Master initiated a file playback while silently examining the underlying data structure.

"Unknown object is projected by Matrix analysis to be a gravitational redistribution calculator with 98% projected accuracy." The computer read off impassively. "Sub-temporal space-faring age technology, likely constructed from space derived resources with... 47% projected accuracy. Upon being connected to a computer system with proper clearance, it can be estimated with 80% projected accuracy that this device provides rapid update mathematical maintenance and corrections to long running artificial gravity subroutines and the machinery they operate. There is a projected 57% possibility that this is used to correct mounting glitches and irregularities in anti-gravity assisted terrestrial constructions, a projected 31% possibility it is the arming device for the gravity well projectors of a military interdiction starship, a projected 4% chance..."

The Master tuned out the computer feedback at this point, running the potential uses of the device through the front of his mind while gears continued to turn in his subconscious about the data file's encryption signature. _"It seems compatible enough with the TARDIS if the security programs could be deactivated, but at most it will allow me to reestablish the interior terrain systems and perhaps get a few impressive tricks out of the chameleon circuit..." _He mused, as it became clear that as impressive as the ornate piece of alien technology was, it was unlikely it would be useful in repairing the actual flight systems of the TARDIS The Master found himself stranded with.

Then, the computer broke from the stream of technical jargon to deliver a new line of information, one that snapped The Master from his mental reprieve. "Aesthetically, there is a projected 70% chance this device is created in the image of White Diamond, supreme leader of the Gem species. There is a greater, projected 99% chance this device is in the image of a different Gem leader."

"That close of a match?" The Master found himself asking aloud, having barely expected it to be modeled after anyone real at all.

"Affirmative. The device has a projected 99.999999998% chance of being a creation of the extinct galactic power known as the Diamond Authority."

Eyebrows shifting as he stroked his beard in curiosity, The Master pressed a short series of buttons to dig deeper into the stolen matrix records, eager for more information on this alien culture he had no immediate recollection of, in neither the first hand or academic sense of experience. The resulting file was disappointingly small, but the data signature of the information continued to prod at The Master's curiosity, driving him to set the file to playback while he delicately explored the programming make up of this matrix information page.

"The Diamond Authority was a geologically short lived galactic power dating to the ancient periods of time. Marked as a potential threat to the Spiral Politic due to the extremely long lived nature of Gemkind, the sole inhabiting species of the political entity, The Diamond Authority made steady imperial gains shortly after achieving FTL travel, but were ultimately rendered extinct during a territorial conflict with the Daleks. Limited information exists on the physical nature of their species outside of them possessing natural lives comparative to those of Time Lords, but it can be inferred that..."

Dismissing the audio playback with a backhanded flick of a switch, The Master stared at the data file in front of him, half scowling and half intrigued. It was obvious to him now that far more information on this supposedly extinct species was contained within the Time Lord Matrix, but was obfuscated behind phantom code strings and alternate projections. "Buried with all the signature tells of the CIA, as they are want to do..." He mused. The means existed to plunge the TARDIS systems into the matrix, and the renegade had a practiced hand at subverting Intervention Agency security protocols, but such an operation would consume a sizable amount of artron energy, which his damaged TARDIS already carried precious little of.

"I suppose I shall simply have to leave the mystery hanging for the moment..." The Master muttered to himself while deactivating the screen with a press of button. Leaving the statue plugged into the console so the TARDIS itself could best determine how to use it for repairs, the renegade moved to a different stretch of controls and began the busy work of establishing a connection to the listening devices he hid in the Universe household, mind buzzing with questions. "So, is this an alternative timeline where the Gem species avoided extermination, and eventually made its way to this wretched world? Or has The Doctor been sheltering the last survivors of a destroyed species amid the ridiculous petting zoo he treats this world as?" He mused aloud, the weight of his mind quick to set on the latter possibility, finding it to be quite in character for his eternal nemesis. "Well, as loathe as I am to provide any sort of act of good will towards the Daleks, finishing their work here will rob The Doctor of another of his pathetic pet species, and that's always a reward in itself..."

* * *

_**AUTHOR'S NOTES: **_So, I know it's been awhile since anyone still following my stories has seen some fresh material from me, and, well there's not much to say. It seems like it's just been one disaster after another as of late, from both a public and personal perspective for me, which has left me in a mental and scheduling state that makes it difficult to accomplish much coherent writing. I'm sure Master of the Universe was hardly what most of you were expecting/hoping would return next, but I hope this chapter is still an enjoyable read in and of itself, disappointment aside. My well wishes go out to everyone and anyone afflicted by this global pandemic, as well as an urgent hope that we can all stay safe, stay calm, and stay well in this troubled time. Hopefully the time of isolation settling upon us will at least prove productive from a cultural perspective.

I am eager to hear any thoughts you might have on this or any other work of mine, and as always I thank anyone who has read all the way to this point, and I hope you enjoyed yourself.


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